This is part 7 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
Here’s a confession. Last time I claimed to have set a story in a future Antarctica.
I lied.
It’s not. The truth is, I set that story in modern day Greenland. Only the place names and the shape of the land is from Antarctica. The rest of it, Greenland.
This lie is the biggest shortcut.
This is how you write a climate scenario without losing your mind.
Here’s how it works...
Why “Lie”?
The number of variables impacted by Climate Change is enormous. No human being can keep track of all that, nor use it to build some world up out of the sum total of those parts. Moreover, even if you did succeed, you would then struggle to know which variables actually matter in a humanly relevant way.
What is it actually like to live there? What clothes do people wear? What houses do they build? What’s the monthly power bill?
That’s why we need a shortcut.
That’s why we need an analogue. A stand in. Something real that’s close enough.
The good news:
For most places some currently existing location probably has a climate that your setting will have in future. It won’t be a perfect match, but the wealth of details is enormously useful.
For Greenland I suddenly discover:
People live in apartment buildings, they get excited about snowmobiles, they have sheep farms, they grow potatoes, mining companies blast holes in mountain sides, ice bergs float down the fiords, the Greenland Ice Sheet is visible from the top of a hill, it’s possible to ride a bicycle to a farm, some people like boats, they wear mittens and complain about the weather....
All of this I can copy-paste to a future Antarctica.
This will be wrong, but it is more plausible than mere guesswork. Ultimately no one knows what the future looks like. The point is to put constraints on the imagination so we don’t write things that are misleading or insane.
Finding an Analogue (a quick hack)
Back in parts 3-5 we figured out our scenario. Within that we should have a rough value for the global temperature increase.
2°C? 3°C? 6°C?
The hacky thing is to just drop this on top of the our locations current average temperature, then add in a few caveats: land warms more than oceans, cold places warm more than hot places (e.g. the Arctic is warming about three times faster than average – use that calibrate what “above average” looks like).
Let’s say we’re doing Invercargill (New Zealand’s southernmost city), with a 3°C global warming at 2100.
Invercargill is 10°C.
So maybe it jumps up to 13°C, or even 14°C (it’s a coldish place).
Now that we’ve got a ballpark figure we can look around for a location which currently has that temperature. I searched the country. In this case Palmerston North might do, at about 13°C that seems reasonable.
Now, because I can, I’ve checked actual numbers and they put future Invercargill around 12°C. So I was wrong, but not ridiculously wrong. Christchurch might be more suitable. At worst I might have ended up with Napier, which is warmer again but still not that much different. I’m not making the mistake of turning Mongolia into Florida.
As aside: you might be seeing why I get annoyed with ultra-mega-doom scenarios. Napier, Palmerston North, Invercargill, and Christchurch are all indistinguishable to outsiders. At best you might notice that two of these get snow and the others don’t. Invercargill and Christchurch, the most accurate match are difficult to distinguish on raw experiential climate terms.
These are subtle differences.
Yet that 2°C is still a major shift, in ecological terms, it just doesn’t seem that way because Climate Change is subtle and complicated and confusing.
Finding an Analogue (moderately more sophisticated hacking)
Global Warming is not as simple as just raising the temperature. Wind, rain, seasonality. All of this shifts. Vegetation patterns shift. Land use possibilities shift. Everything shifts.
Thankfully you might not have to look far to find an analogue.
What is happening is that the underlying biomes are moving. Something next door might be moving in, while the present-day stuff is itself displacing another neighbor.
Expanding.
Contracting.
Moving.
Take a look around the bio-geographical neighborhood. See who might move in.
For parts of South Africa that might be the Kalahari Desert expanding. For Mongolia it might by the Gobi Desert shifting north. The Amazon might end up like the Cerrado. Northern Europe might feel more like Southern Europe.
All of these will be “wrong”. They’re approximations. But we are getting ourselves in the right zone.
The limitations of being a hack
First, any analogue will be subject to climate factors that having nothing to do with climate change. They will be misleading in this regard. e.g. Christchurch experiences mountain related fohn winds in a way that Invercargill doesn’t.
Second, not everything has a modern day analogue. This is especially true in the tropics. We have nothing more tropical than tropical. But that’s going to change.
Climate Change will create conditions that no one is experiencing right now. Things that have never existed in human history.
Rainfall will be more extreme and concentrated. Storms more violent. Weird things will happen like shifts in wind patterns, changes in ocean currents, changes in El Niño. We’ve also completely ignored ocean acidification and sea level rise here.
For all those it takes a combination of research and imagination.
Next time we’ll look at some research resources.
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